Technosailor.com

Festivus was the other day, the traditional day that people “air their grievances”. Since I did not do that but I seem to be a bit fired up today, I’m going to separate from the normal informative, intellectual articles that would normally go up here, and instead rant a bit. Because there are a lot of things to rant about and I believe very good reasons for those rants to come. If you will allow me…

Google is known for doing many things right. Despite giving them a hard time over the years, it’s undeniable that my life still revolves, in a very real way, around Google products. I use Gmail not only for, er, Gmail but I use Google Apps to run all my email services including my public aaron@technosailor.com email.

While I don’t use Google Docs much (I much prefer Apple’s iWork for office productivity and am required to use Microsoft Word for my book), it is undeniable that it is one of the best collaborative document workspaces on the internet.

Google search still has not been replaced by Bing and I’m not expecting that to change anytime soon.

Sitting here in Automattic offices in San Francisco, I find myself lovingly caressing my Blackberry which, for a short time yesterday, I believed was separated from me for good. Turns out I lost it the night before and was having phantom spasms over not having it in my pocket to check email, twitter or do other activities I would normally engage in with my long-time partner and friend.

As I arose from my grogginess yesterday morning, my first instinct was to reach for my Blackberry to ascertain important overnight occurrences. You know, such as what drunken text messages I might have sent or had sent to me, what the final score was on the Red Sox game or who was talking about me on Twitter. It’s a hard habit to break so when I realized my phone was nowhere to be found, I panicked.

There is no doubt that Google is the king of search but how did they become that way? In the old days (you know, before PageRank was dubbed irrelevant), the idea was that the number of links to a site, particularly by more “powerful” sites increased the relevance of an indexed page in the Google [...]

I’ve been a fan of FeedBurner for a long time. Going all the way back to the early days at b5media when they were a good company. Then they sold out to Google, and I warned any who would listen exactly who they would become. It was denied, though (most likely in good faith), and [...]

It appears some sort of bug has snuck into the Google secret sauce. A feature that was intended to warn users of potential phishing sites has jumped the shark declaring the internet harmful. That’s right, every single result is deemed by Google to be harmful.

This is surely a bug and will be fixed but these guys really should be running some QA testing before rolling new releases.